Did you know that when people talk about a baby sleeping through the night, that technically only means they sleep 6 or more hours in a row? I don't know about you, but that is not sleeping through the night for me. So sure, Mack did start doing that around 7 or 8 weeks. And I'm not complaining - after 3 or fewer hour stretches being the longest amount of sleep I had had before then - 6 hours was feeling pretty great. And supposedly there are moms and babies out there for whom even that doesn't happen (although all the moms I talked to seemed to have babies sleeping through the night at 4 weeks). But honestly, it just made me greedier for more sleep :-). I'm such an ingrate ;-).
Mack is such a joy when people ask me about him, I am quick to respond that he is an easy baby. But I think I just had low expectations and so all my expectations have been surpassed :-). Don't you find that is the trick to happiness? To not expect much and then everything comes out so much better than you imagined? Because as I think about his sleeping, he really hasn't been that easy. I think just because he wasn't up all night screaming, I was thinking I have it pretty good!
Mack hasn't been the most consistent sleeper. When I put him down for bed at 10, he would sleep until 4 - which is good. But eventually you like to get some couple time alone and try for the earlier - say 7:30 or 8:00 pm - bedtime. So then he was waking up at like 1 or 2 am- which for me was only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. Then I would feed, he would wake at 6, feed again, sleep and wake sometime b/t 7:30 and 8:30. Sure he would start to skip the 1 am feeding for a couple of nights, but then all of a sudden he would start waking up again - and there was still the 5/6 am feeding - blech!
In any case, I am praying that this is the new norm and I might start to get a caught up on the sleep debt I have racked up over the last 5 months.
That's another thing I learned about sleep. Without it, I am an idiot. Literally when I talk, I think one thing and say another. I probably don't make sense to anyone. I don't remember anything. I make the stupidest mistakes. I bang my head into everything. I feel like I am a zombie when out with other people and none of my dazzling personality is left ;-). I ramble on in blog posts without correcting run-on sentences... You get the picture.
But it is also amazing how your body adjusts to little sleep and you can still operate without it. I still feel really tired, so lets hope that's just because my body has had the taste of sleep and wants more... and not because I have something like cancer.
I also have to brag on Andy that over the past 5 months he would always get up with Mack on Saturdays and let me sleep after I fed him. Those Saturday mornings really kept me going, honey! I love you :-). (Of course, I would wake up to see Mack wide awake but still swaddled in his swing. Or after I explained to Andy you should unswaddle the baby after he was awake, I would find Mack in the swing about to fall out b/c he wasn't buckled in, but you know, daddies have a learning curve too :-).) And I have to confess that despite my lack of sleep, I still never napped - that whole "sleep when the baby sleeps" never really worked for me - I am just not a napper and can only sleep at night. And I also never went to bed at 8 with the baby which would have seemed to be the logical thing to do. I think you crave (I apologize in advance b/c I really hate this expression) "me" time where you can read a book, watch a show or do whatever you feel like doing sans baby... So some of the lack of sleep was/is self induced. Poor Mack can't take all the blame!
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